Saturday, 10 January 2015

Rush Hour

I did this review of Iain Gately's Rush Hour for the Guardian:

In
his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday
Life, the Belgian Situationist thinker Raoul Vaneigem wondered how much
humanity could possibly remain in people “dragged out of sleep at six every
morning, jolted about in suburban trains” and “tossed out at the end of the day
into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for
the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd
communes in a brutish weariness”. While they might flinch at the unflattering wording,
quite a few of the world’s
half a billion commuters would surely agree with Vaneigem that the part of the
day they spend getting to and returning from work is dead time that simply has to be
endured.

And
yet there is a small but distinguished body of literature about this banal and
taken-for-granted routine. I can think of three minor classics – Roger Green’s Notes from Overground, Marc Augé’s In the Metro and Christopher Ross’s Tunnel Visions – that have found a
strange, melancholic poetry in the somnambulant iterations and thrown-together community
of the daily commute. To this list we can now add Iain Gately’s Rush Hour. It is
not as lyrical as these books, nor as personal, although it does begin with him
shivering one wintry Monday on platform one at Botley station in Hampshire,
waiting for the 07.01 to London Waterloo. But he too finds this daily ritual
full of anthropological interest and surreal juxtapositions.

Gately’s history starts with the London and
Greenwich railway line, opened in 1836 with just under four miles of track and
the first line to be used mainly by commuters, and takes us up to the gamechanging possibilities offered
by driverless cars and telecommuting. Commuting emerges
as a sort of banal, undemanding white noise around which creative things happen.
Albert Einstein, we learn, was
inspired to wonder whether time might be relative while commuting to work as a
patent clerk in Bern and gazing up at the town hall clock from the window of
his tram.

Gately has
a great eye for the illuminating fact that reveals commuting’s capacity to consolidate
and synchronise mass behaviour in weird ways. An international urban planning
conference in New York in 1898, for example, estimated that the city’s horses, increasing
rapidly in number as more were needed to drive the carriages and omnibuses carrying
commuters, left 2.5 million pounds of manure on its streets every day and that,
if the horse population kept growing at its current rate, manure would fill the
city’s streets up to the level of its third-storey windows by 1930. The Times
was less alarmist, estimating that London would be only nine feet deep in
manure by 1950.

Gately
takes us beyond the familiar image of the stockbroker-belt commuter – the
famous uniform of briefcase, furled umbrella and bowler hat was, he notes, only
common for about thirty years – into the more proletarian city trams and buses
where commuting was slower, more congested and more uncomfortable. In the
1950s, Birmingham’s number 8 bus, nicknamed the “Workmen’s Special” because it
decanted workers into and out of Ansells Brewery, Saltley gas works and the HP Sauce
factory, had its own micro-climate in which, according to one user, “the sweat
would run down the inside of the windows, the cigarette smoke was like a London
smog and the bus was always bloomin’ freezing”.

Given the
constraints of space and the size of his subject, Gately makes a decent stab at
delivering a truly global history of commuting. In much of Asia, he points out,
commuting on two wheels remains the norm. In communist China until recently, the
commuter’s vehicle of (limited) choice was the Flying Pigeon, a single-gear bicycle
which came only in black, cost two months’ salary and had a three-year waiting
list.At least 500 million Flying
Pigeons have been ridden since 1950, making it the most popular vehicle in
history. In
1978, Deng
Xiaoping defined national prosperity as “a pigeon in every household” and many young
women would only accept a marriage proposal if their prospective husband could
afford one.When China began to admit westerners
in the early 1980s, the Beijing rush hour became an unlikely tourist attraction:
“Fleets of cyclists ghosted over intersections a hundred or so abreast in the
morning mist, tinkling their bells. Most wore identical trouser suits – grey men
on black bikes – and their apparent sameness contributed to the strangeness of
the vision.”

Throughout
most of Asia, including China, the Flying Pigeon has now been supplanted by the
Honda C100 Super Cub scooter, introduced in Japan in 1958, still in production
and easily the world’s bestselling motor vehicle. Its unique selling points
were 19-inch wheels to cope with the heavily potholed Japanese roads and “a
step-through profile, so that women could board it without having to hitch up
their skirts”.

The weaker
parts of Rush Hour are where Gately
approaches commuting from the outside in, giving us potted, familiar histories
of the growth of the railways, the car industry and the suburbs. Mostly,
though, he succeeds in unearthing the arcane detail of commuting in order to
shed interesting light on these larger issues. Rush Hour reveals how the commute has so often driven social change,
from shifting breakfast time to earlier in the day to transforming social etiquette
about talking to (or, mostly, ignoring) strangers; and it shows how commuting
has inspired new technologies from the car radio to the cheap pocket watch with
standardised parts. (According to Gately, Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, forever fishing his watch out of his pocket and muttering “Oh
dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”, is a version of the mid-Victorian
commuter neurotically anxious about missing the train.) Commuting is even to blame, he claims, for
the Chris Evans Breakfast Show, this “morning zoo” style of radio programme being
a product of the commuter’s “diminished ability to focus”.

Gately’s contention
is that, in spite of the fact that it reduces its victims to daily frustration,
discomfort and impotence, commuting also offers them freedom of movement and
the chance to improve their lives. Although he does not mention them, his book
is a kind of answer to Vaneigem and the Situationists who, witnessing the reconstruction of
Paris in the postwar years and the dispersal of workers into the banlieues, defined
commuting as
worthless, alienated labour. Sometimes, in comparison, Gately’s outlook can feel too
sunny. While I do not suggest that he should have provided a Situationist-style
critique of commuting or a political economy of it (his book is too much fun for
that), he could have dwelled more on how its tedium, like many of the supposedly
universal chores of daily life, is unfairly distributed.

But
this book offers only minor frustrations – appropriately enough, since that,
according to Gately, is all that commuting offers as well. Since my trip from
home to work desk takes just 20 minutes, I can barely call myself a commuter,
but I loved this book’s generosity and curiosity about daily life and the
people who find themselves stuck in it. Anyone who does commute would find
their journey to work enlivened and enlightened by it.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog